Amazon.com rolled out a digital wallet for smartphones just days before the release of its Fire, hinting at the retailer’s ambition to make the handset akin to a mobile cash register.

The new app, Amazon Wallet, allows people to store loyalty cards or gift cards to use at checkout, Amazon said. Amazon lists about 70 participating retailers, including Dress Barn and Legal Sea Foods, whose gift cards will display a balance in the app.

Amazon Wallet will be preinstalled on the Fire smartphone, due out Friday, and can be downloaded from Google’s Play app store. A spokeswoman declined to say if it would be made available in Apple’s app store or whether customers would be able to store credit cards on the app.

The app, which Amazon said is still in beta, is one of dozens of digital wallets, including Apple’s Passbook, all of which promise to eliminate physical credit, debit and loyalty cards. But digital wallets have failed to gain much traction, in part because there is little effort to swiping credit cards at checkout. Google, for instance, has cycled through several iterations of its digital wallet.

The Fire has several features designed to encourage people to keep buying products at any time throughout the day, notably a software program called “Firefly” that can identify and store merchandise through the handset’s camera. For a limited time, the Fire comes with a free year of Amazon’s Prime unlimited shipping membership, which normally costs $99.

With the Wallet app and smartphone, Amazon appears to be moving closer to its goal of offering merchants a digital cash register through the Kindle Fire tablet. That would put Amazon in competition with PayPal as well as Square and other startups.